NBA Salary Commitments

As I sit around killing time until I can play some pick up basketball at the park, I'm taking a look at the salary data available at HoopsHype.com.  NBA salaries amuse.  Every year we get to see the winner's curse in action.  They gave how much to Joe Johnson?  Why on earth would you sign Hedo Turkoglu to a five year deal (and how the heck was he traded twice within the first 18 months of his contract)?  I took a look at each team and made some tables and graphs of each team's salary commitment.

Here is the link to the spreadsheet I created.  HoopsHype.com counts any guaranteed money and any Player Options as committed salary.  Team options and qualifying offers do not count.  Year 2011 is the 2011-2012 season.

Here's the link to the picture in its entirety.  Miami has the highest salary commitments for the next five years and then Atlanta to a lesser extent.  On the other end of the spectrum, Sacramento, LA Clippers and Utah have no salary commitments after the next two years.  To summarize:

   

After three seasons, half the league will have less than $10 million in salary commitments.  After four seasons, about 85% of the league has less than $10 million committed.  As bad as your team's salary situation is now, in three to four years your team will have a fresh start.

I took a look at each teams' salary commitments and ranked them from the most onerous commitment (Miami Heat) to the least onerous (Sacramento Kings).  This is highly subjective.  I do not take into account cap space, which is different than committed salary. I tend to value teams with less years of committed salary over teams with less total dollars committed.  I'd rather spend $86 million over two years like the Utah Jazz than have $83 million committed over 3 years like the New Jersey Nets.  Most importantly, I do not take into account who that money is committed to.  I do not distinguish between 5 years of Lebron James (yes please) versus 5 years of Joe Johnson (ug).  Maybe in a subsequent post I'll delve into that a bit.





From Cleveland to Sacramento, the teams have lots of flexibility. They basically have a fresh start after two years.  I'm impressed by how San Antonio is able to be so good now and still maintain so much future flexibility.  San Antonio had the best record in its conference this year.  The other contenders--and all the other playoff teams except Denver--have large salary commitments to the near term.